The community in Murwillumbah rose to the occasion, with 1800 guests, a hand-pulled chariot, dancing, feasting, chanting and music, the performers projected onto a giant screen befitting a jam-packed rock concert.

A parade pulling a chariot begins celebrations at the Hare Krishna Farm to mark the 50th anniversary of the movement.Trevor Gore

Amid the festivities was a man with more reason to celebrate than most - though perhaps more sedately, considering his venerable 74 years, and recent triple bypass surgery.

Mukunda Goswami was a co-founder of the movement, there at the very start. Back in the heady 1960s, a young seeker who had found a spiritual haven, he signed the lease for the movement's first "home" in America, a small gift shop on New York's Lower East Side that became the first Hare Krishna temple in America.

Two years later, Mukunda drove to San Francisco, not to wear flowers in his hair but to start another temple in the Haight-Ashbury area, home of 1967's Summer of Love.

He sympathised with the hippies and their call for troops to leave Vietnam but says he "wasn't really one of them".

"I was a little stand-offish - they were too alternative for me. I didn't adopt the hairstyle and wasn't an advocate of free love, I agreed with their philosophy but I wasn't part of the movement. It was an exciting time but it had a very dark side to it," he recalls.

However, he says the local police liked "the swami's boys" because they were helping to keep the kids off drugs.

Mukunda was born in Portland, Oregon, and after university he travelled to New York City, a jazz musician pulled to the vibrant music scene of the time.

In New York he found himself increasingly playing "commercial work, in tourist places".